Tuesday, 17 December 2013

Creating Readers

By
Michael Rosen

I’ve sometimes said that reading books in schools is a
subversive activity. This seems counter-intuitive. Schools are surely places
which foster the idea that the written text is one of the best means of
carrying ideas and knowledge.

On close examination,
it’s possible to see that a) one kind of written text dominates the
scene and b) one kind of reading dominates. That’s to say, the texts are
predominantly instructive, didactic full of closed-ended – or at best – Socratic
questions which tie the learner to answering exactly as the apparent author of
the texts (text-book author, teacher, examiner ?) demands.

So, right from the
earliest years, children are confronted with texts that are, say, supposedly
teaching the child how to read (synthetic phonics and reading schemes), moving
on remarkably soon to ‘comprehension’ texts and worksheets, in which children
are asked factual questions about supposed facts in the text they have just
read, moving on to many variations of this, right the way to GCSE.

Of course, the purpose and function of reading in society
is much more than this. In one sense, we can say that the world’s wisdom has up
until fairly recently been captured in books. Of course, there are other
sources for ideas – the electronic media in all their complexity, and that
traditional means – talk and, more importantly, we shouldn’t think of one part
of the inter-mediate world as excluding another.

Books aren’t in contradiction with the internet,
say. However, if we exclude the reading
of whole books from the reading diet of someone – or whole groups of people – a
serious deprivation is taking place.

At one level, this deprivation is about specificity and
the other about heterodoxy. That’s to
say, on account of the economics of book-publishing over many centuries, it is
nearly always true to say that whatever a person’s specific needs and
curiosities, it’s possible to find a book that fits it. What’s more, on account
of that publishing history, the world of books contains thousands of texts
which defy the dominant ideas of the day.

At another level, it’s possible to say that there is
something significant about browsing. What is browsing? It’s the scanning of
texts in order to find out what you want. Browsing involves comparing,
contrasting, selecting – and most importantly – the setting up of informal and
formal ‘sets’.

Children given regular opportunities to browse and sort
piles of books, magazine, comics and the like will do these things. And what
are they? The very processes that thousands of tedious worksheets try to
‘teach’: compare, contrast, select and group.

It could be argued that most of education is based around
these practices. I’ve seen six year olds sorting their comics or books over and
over again, doing just this. It’s a crucial textual practice which schools try
to teach but which takes place in certain kinds of homes (ie the ones with many
books) every day.

We also know that when I say ‘certain homes’, the
implication is that I mean ‘middle class’ or ‘educated’ or ‘professional’.
True, mostly, but not entirely so. There are some specific instances where
homes where the parent or parents have reason to provide many books, magazines
and comics for their children or for themselves or both – politics being one of
them.

My father came from a working-class ‘vertical’ family
home with mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles (and no father) present. Two
or three of them were highly politicised, filling the house with pamphlets,
newspapers, books (and talk about those books) and took full advantage of the
local library in a systematic, regular way.

A vast longitudinal study from the University of Nevada,
involving tens of thousands of children across 27 countries has discovered the
same thing. That’s to say, independent of class/income and education, the
presence of many books (eg 500) in a home has an add-on effect of 3 years more
take-up of schooling by the child(ren) from such a home.

This sort of thing has been known informally and formally
by teachers for decades. In the days
when every big school in a working-class area would have at least one child
whose parent or parents were active in, say, trade unions, the Labour Party or
other left parties, teachers knew that that child was being exposed to something
significant in the way of literacy, language and thought. Politicians have known it and have been told
it many times over – some of them by me! But, significantly, they do nothing
about it.

Why is that? Because they work to a different model of
literacy, knowledge and education. For them, it must be instructional,
instrumental (that’s to say there must be evidence that what’s being taught
must ‘do’ something), and functional (that’s to say the thing that it’s ‘doing’
must be seen to have a ‘use’ ).

Reading for pleasure in this scheme of things is an
extra, a suitable leisure activity, or even something too complicated for the
lower orders – even though the evidence I’m citing shows precisely the
opposite. If you like it’s more instructional, more instrumental, more
functional – and a lot more besides – than the stuff that is dished up in the
name of literacy, knowledge and education: the worksheets, reading schemes,
exercises, text books and the like that dominate education.

When I say – ‘and a lot more besides’ – what do I mean?
This is where we confront the issue of ‘literature’ which I’ll broadly define
as ‘figurative writing’ – that’s to say kinds of writing in which the main
beings/creatures/humans in the piece along with many of the objects and aspects
of ‘nature’ are there in unreal, metaphorical, allegorical, representational
ways. They are ‘acting out’ scenes and ideas.

These processes, which we find in poems, stories, plays,
films and the like, combine ideas with feelings – their own and the
readers’/viewers’/listeners’. And these ideas and feelings appear to be
attached to the beings in the literature as they ‘act out’ the events in their
existence.

The business of combining ideas and feelings is crucial.
This is how we are affected by what happens.
We say we are ‘touched’ even as we evaluate the rightness/wrongness,
fairness/unfairness etc of how the beings are behaving.

What’s really interesting from an educational point of
view is that at any given moment (I’ll come back to that moment), that
evaluating act can suddenly dominate and the audience (let’s say a class of
young people) will want to discuss values and ethics of what’s going on. This is crucial.

One of the fundamental tenets underlying education is
that it will enable children to generalise about themselves, events and the
world in order to spot patterns or even to give names to phenomena so that they
can be seen as not random one-off events.
So we might imagine that education will enable young people to think and
talk about, let’s say, injustice, envy, power, anger and the like.

Open-ended engagement with literature is one of the ways
in which we can all get handles on these difficult and important ideas. In fact, it’s the easiest, most accessible
way in which we can do it. Anyone who has sat with young children reading and
talking will find that inevitably, one arrives at these moments where the ideas
about the feelings (but also with the feelings) become important.

So, drawing all these thoughts together, I come to the
conclusion that schools should be places that should strain every part of
themselves to foster reading for pleasure: in class, in break-times, after
school and in the children’s/students’ homes.

This involves some very practical work: asking the parents
to set up some kind of reading committee which has the job of getting books
into the hands of children of all backgrounds; creating a relationship with
local libraries that goes beyond the tokenistic nod eg arranging to issue
tickets to reception and year 1 children; creating regular ‘book events’ with
authors,talks, films, music; making the connection between all school
activities and books that relate to them eg in relation to trips, sports,
projects, changes in the school; involving all school-workers and staff in this
book project – eg caretakers, dinner and cleaning staff particularly as many of
them will be parents or ex-parents of pupils; re-thinking ‘literacy’ as ‘many
literacies’ ie involving all languages, different means of ‘delivery’ eg newspapers,
phone apps, computer screens, graphic design and therefore on the back of that,
engaging practitioners, especially parents, in all those fields to come into
schools in order to share with the children/students what they’re doing.;
thinking of everything that children write as potential scripts for publishing
or performing with outlets such as school websites, informal magazines,
classroom ‘sketches’, plays, cabarets, parent-child book-making etc etc central
to literacy for all.

Put all that together and we have a theory and practice
of universal literacy in schools. This is an urgent part of our demands for
emancipation and liberation for all.